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Tak and the Power of Juju Review/Transcript
(Shows two deer in the forest, suddenly, the deer are crushed by a giant foot. The camera pans up to reveal giant wood monsters storming through the forest) Jibolba: '*gasps* The Woodies are coming! ''(Intro) I remember ''Tak and the Power of Juju ''being this ''really big franchise that came like, out of nowhere back in the mid-2000s. Right out of nowhere, there were games, toys, and of course, a cartoon. The franchise was almost ''inescapable ''for a short period of time. Even if you didn't watch the show or play the video games, you at least heard about it. And then one day, the franchise completely vanished and nobody ever talked about it again. If I had to wager a guess, I would assume Tak's popularity was a result of "astroturfing," people paying a lot of money to make their product look extremely popular in hopes that it actually becomes popular. You know like somebody buying a shit ton of copies of their own book to get on the New York Times' Best Seller list. Because, this is kinda what happens during a failed astroturfing campaign. You hear about it a lot, and then the whole franchise just goes poof. The Tak and the Power of Juju ''cartoon came out at the tail end of the franchise's popularity, and it may have been the final nail in the coffin, because this show is '''not good'. I had guessed, that this wouldn't be a fun one going in because I get requests for Tak and the Power of Juju ''all the time. Even though it was completely off the air since I had started. Usually people only request shows that are currently airing but, ''Tak ''was a bit of a different case. That being said, I didn't know how bad this show was, and it's '''bad'. Like, really bad. I mean, it-it's not the worst cartoon that I've ever seen or even the worst Nicktoon ever, but this show has nothing ''going for it. Let's start with the most pressing problem of the show, and that's the animation. As you can tell, it's CGI. Now that's not a problem in and of itself. ''Jimmy Neutron was CGI and it looked alright, especially for the time. The problem is that bad CGI tends to look worse than bad hand-drawn animation. And well, Tak and the Power of Juju ''has the second worst animation of any 3D Nicktoon. Yes, even the later more infamous cartoons like ''Fanboy and Chum Chum, Planet Sheen, and Robot and Monster. They all have better animation than Tak and the Power of Juju. The ''only ''CGI cartoon that looks worse than Tak and the Power of Juju ''is ''Monsters vs. Aliens ''and we're gonna be getting to that disaster piece much later. I'm not talking about the character designs here, they look exactly like the toys they were meant to push, no, I'm talking about ''literally everything else. The trees look like they were made out of plastic. The houses look like they were taken from a Playstation game from 1995. This show looks ugly '''as sin, and it's not just in the overall appearance, the biggest problem comes from how everyone moves. This is actually a huge problem because it makes everything else about this show almost ''unsalvageable. Timing is incredibly important in terms of comedy. It's a good thing that whoever animated this thing has no idea how to pace a shot! Even worse though is that you can never really feel an impact in this show. People do get hit by objects, but more often than not, it looks like a collision error rather than slapstick. So, that's any sense of comedy, goodbye! And don't even get me started on the expressions that the characters try to make. They look godawful! And it's a big problem when the show often tries to be one of those slapstick-heavy cartoons. Yeah, for the most part this cartoon wants to make you laugh with the random misfortunes, but every single part of it is poorly-constructed. Oh, and don't get me started on anything that isn't ''solid. Dust, particle effects, they're all basically just layered over the shot. It's like a toddler drawing on a television screen to add to his VHS recording. The dust effects are often used to mass buildings and people going from one state to another, and it's incredibly obvious. If a monster's going to destroy a building for instance, it'll look fine. Then dust comes over, and then the building is immediately broken with no debris whatsoever. The shortcuts that this show takes are ''incredibly ''noticeable and they constantly look lazy. What can you expect when the budget of the show's a trade-in at GameStop? Am I being too harsh on this? No. I expect a cartoon based on a Playstation 2 game, to have better animation than you'd find on the Playstation 1. And this is ''not an exaggeration. Look at some of the stuff that you'd find on that console. Meanwhile, here you have Tak ''looking like a failing college freshman's midterm exam. And in this show, the animation is especially important! This isn't a story-driven show like ''As Told by Ginger that can get away with having ugly animation. I mean, it better not be a story-driven show. It stars Tak, a shaman-in-training who's bad at being a shaman. So basically show is about a novice magician screwing up at magic. Considering this is a tale as old as the 1940s Fantasia, you're going to need to bring something really creative to mix it up. Star vs. The Forces of Evil ''got over this uncreative and cliched idea by being full of energy and having really great characters. I guess ''Tak ''kinda has something like that. Tak's best friend is the tomboy princess. Or...the chiefdom's daughter. Oh wait, that's not creative at all. Oh wait! The leader of the tribe, her father, he-he's a dumbass fat slob! Oh wait, that is one of the most cliched things that I've ever seen. Uh, what about the idiot best friend? No, no, no, that-that-that's been done to death too. Oh wait, I got it, I know something that ''Tak and the Power of Juju ''has that no other show in history has! It is the most creative thing that this show could possibly do! It has Patrick Warburton playing a stupid strongman character. I guess this show takes place in a ''tribal village which is unusual, but that's not really much. Is The Jetsons ''really all that different than ''The Flintstones ''in hindsight? It's the same character types doing the same thing in different settings. And that's ''Tak's problem. We've seen these characters in so many other cartoons, and this show doesn't have a creative bone in its body. If you must know, Tak is a sorcerer's apprentice. I mean a magician-in-training. I mean, a shaman's assistant in the villlage of...Pupununu, which sounds like a pet name that you'd give your dog. Tak is not very good at this. Sometimes. It's really inconsistent. Sometimes he's able to cast a spell without a hitch! Sometimes he screws it up for absolutely no reason! And sometimes it's only because his mentor gave him the wrong spell. Oh by the way, Tak never uses magic words when he's waving his juju wand about. It just...goes badly randomly. Ah yes, Tak has the power of juju. Juju's actually a real thing. I mean, okay, that was worded wrong, it's actually a real belief system. It's absolutely nothing like how it's portrayed in Tak and the Power of Juju. In the actual West African belief system, juju is mostly about luck. You know, giving someone good or bad juju. It's not...really magic, and it's certainly not about talking to extraplanar beings. Yeah, in this show, juju is not just magic, but juju is also a plane of existence. And it's also a group of people like Dungeons & Dragons demons or The Elder Scrolls ''Daedra. This may seem a little bit petty, but, it-it's a bad thing when you take something real like this, and just completely 'badly 'misunderstand it. I mean it's not like they're talking about voodoo, something that's already been watered down into cartoonishness. No, they're talking about something no one else really uses for, I have no idea, I guess they wanted to be "original." Speaking of which, the fantastical creatures in this show have the same amount of creativity as the rest of the characters. Oh look. An octopus person. A-a giant spider creature. A-plus design on that! Wooden...things...I hope these aren't taken straight from the games, because these are all boring as hell. I'm not asking them to take things from like an actual mythology system, although that would be pretty cool and it would warrant using juju, but I do expect something a little bit more...alien? A little bit more fantastical than things I've seen a 'thousand 'fucking times? Some things that work in a video game don't work in a cartoon and vice-versa. While the video games tend to be a cult classic and fondly remembered, I don't think ''anyone ''is going to go out of their way to watch whatever the hell I just did. And that's probably for the best, because the best thing I can say about this show is that it's forgettable. It's bland. It's cliched. And it's poorly put-together. Which is probably the last nail in the coffin for ''Tak. Making a cartoon this bad has to be bad juju of some kind, I'd imagine. 'Announcer: '''Coming up, it's- ''(Shows clip of Back at the Barnyard theme song) (End Credits Theme: Music from one of the Tak and the Power of Juju video games??) Category:Nick-o-Rama Category:Transcripts